Has the War on Terror Provoked a Clash of Civilizations?: Notes on the Debate

The culminating event of the 2009 Jaipur Literature Festival was a debate considering the statement: “The war on terror has provoked a clash of civilizations.” Hosted on Sunday evening by Intelligence Squared, whose guiding principle is that debate is a form of communication that advances careful consideration of major issues, the debate followed a degenerative downward spiral, underscoring the corollary principle that communication is the frailest and yet the most indispensable imperative of the day.

Eight participants offered arguments (or dallied in disconnected diversions) either for or against the statement before an audience of about 600. The proceedings were moderated poorly and partially by journalist Barkha Dutt, who immediately descended into the “us versus them” rhetoric that the debate was meant to expose and expel. When participant Simon Schama bounded up to the microphone to criticize her lengthy and, granted, biased introduction, she vindictively responded, “We Indians are used to taking rudeness from foreigners.” Thus offenses were committed, insults deployed, before the debate even began.

Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, historian Simon Schama, and Washington Post editor and writer Rajiv Chandrasekaran nevertheless charged forward in an attempt to redeem the spirit of the debate. Their arguments were delivered with vigor and interrupted by the rumble of traditional Indian drums when their time was up. Ashish Nandy, Mohammad Hanif, and Swapan Dasgupta followed with intellectually tepid remarks, and M.J. Akbar attempted bravely to tie up loose ends. They were all outdone, however, by the vitriolic claim sustained by columnist Tarun Vijay: the clash was between the civilized Hindu nation on one side and barbarism exemplified by Wahhabi Islam on the other. He added, for good measure, that India was certainly not a secular nation, but was a religious nation and, more importantly, a Hindu nation. The audience audibly objected, but he insisted, “India is a Hindu nation in the same way that the United States is a Latin Christian nation.”

When the floor was opened to questions from the audience, most of them were direct challenges to Tarun Vijay’s Hindu nationalist position. That is, until the microphone was seized by the popular actor Anupam Kher, who accused the participants of over-intellectualizing the question and then demanded an answer to his own question: what did they have to say to those who had lost loved ones to terrorist violence? Anupam dismissed every answer offered by the panelists and refused to relinquish the microphone.

The comedic tragedy of a debate gone bad was sustained to the last moment, when the audience was asked to vote “yes” or “no” in response to the statement under discussion. The fall of darkness made a vote by show of hand impossible, so Barkha Dutt proposed a voice vote. The audience response was “no,” that the war on terror had not, in itself, produced a clash of civilizations. Dutt, clearly dissatisfied with this response, encouraged the “yes” voters to raise their voices once more, then summarily declared that the debate had been won in favor of the statement. Simon Schama cradled his head in his hands, disappointed and dismayed, as many were, at the clash of communication on display before him. .

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*Intelligence Squared has announced that the debate will be available to view at their website in the near future. Check back later for the link.
*Read a news article about the event at Samachaar or SindhToday.